Cambronne's Reply

The models are all based, so I'm all set for tomorrow's small Waterloo bicentennial game.

Back to the painting table after a very long absence. Partly this was due to the usual real life suspects (semester from hell at work, new adorable pet, etc., etc., yeah, yeah you've heard it all before), and then later due to a three-and-a-half week stay in France after the semester ended. Being in France, I was of course reminded on numerous occasions that June 18 of this year marks the bicentennial anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.

So this past weekend, I set myself a "Waterloo Anniversary Painting Challenge" to try and have a small French vs. British game using One-Hour Wargames on the 18th to commemorate the event in my own small way.

This was a tricky proposition since:

1) I decided I wanted to have units twice the size of those I used previously so I'd have to paint some more French than I already have; and

2) I had no painted British troops at all.

Fortuntately, the simple painting method I used before made this doable.


Here's how my "forced march" has broken down time-wise to this point, with only the final basing to go:

June 13 (four hours spread across multiple sessions): Early morning, stuck 194 unpainted 6mm minis (mostly in four-man strips) on tongue depressors with blu-tack, then primed them black. Afternoon, a first coat of color on all the jackets, then in the evening a second coat, and finally the British got a third coat (red always seems to need that extra layer) that night. I also painted the wooden bases they'll eventually get glued to.

June 14 (four hours spread across multiple sessions): Painted trousers, horses, artillery pieces, and the ground on each model/strip. Then touched up a number of sloppy bits with black.

June 15 (four hours spread across multiple sessions): Painted backpacks, weapons, and flesh.

June 16 (two hours in two sessions): Morning, touched up any little spots where I "went outside the lines." Afternoon, sprayed them with a protective clearcoat.

All that remains is to glue them to their wooden bases, which I'll do this evening or tomorrow morning, once the spray clear coat is completely dry. I expect that to take about one hour.

All told, I will have completed 194 miniatures start to finish in roughly 15 hours over four days. Looks like I'm good to go for June 18 with a day to spare. With any other size miniature cranking out this many models in so few days would have been impossible. I love 6mm.

A Happy New Year to all!  I closed out the old and rang in the new yesterday and this morning by completing most of my 1HW Austrians.


Four line infantry, two light infantry and two artillery for a total of eight units.


Been working on terrain too. The felt I ordered arrived, and I tried a (for me) new hill making technique by "gift wrapping" some beveled wood blocks in the same felt I'm using for the flat terrain. A bit stylized, but very practical. Trees have arrived as well -- I had nothing appropriate for 6mm minis on a 15" square battlefield -- and I mounted them on 1" round bases.

Of course the next steps are to play out a full game, put up a bat rep, and then finish painting my Austrian cavalry.

After that some more terrain. I still have some buildings to paint, some blue and tan felt to cut into rivers and roads, and some hobby wood to build a bridge or two.

Grading papers and pre-holiday travel made the last two weeks hectic, but I still got some painting done. I also decided I didn't look the sparse look of my 6mm troops spread out on the 2" x 2" bases, so I re-based (glad I didn't flock) on 1.5" x 1" bases, in double line for infantry, single line for cavalry, and I like them much better this way.


So now my French Army set for One-Hour Wargames is done:

4 Line Infantry Units
2 Cavalry Units
2 Artillery Units
2 Light Infantry Units

With the units on smaller bases, I'll probably make the battlefield smaller than I originally intended (probably 15" x 15" or so) and switch the range and movement measurements to cm rather than the inches as in the R.A.W. After seeing the successful play through at Shaun's Wargaming with Miniatures blog on a 12" x 12" battlefield, I'm not worried about playing on a smaller area. It obviously works just fine, and a game space approximating the dimensions of a moderately sized chess board will fit nicely on the desk in my study.

I also picked up some Baccus 6mm Napoleonic British (even though I've already got the Austrians in the queue for the work bench), as well as some 6mm buildings in the "Simply 6" range sold by Scale Creep Miniatures.

It's not the Grande Armée yet, but it's growing.

Despite being swamped with end-of-semester grading and pre-holiday prep, I managed to complete a unit of cuirassiers and added flags to the previously painted infantry.


Some thoughts:

• The blue looks a lot lighter in the photos than it does to the naked eye; "in person" the blue looks much darker (and from far enough away it actually just looks black).
• For unit flags I went with a simplified late Napoleonic-era tricolore style solely because the larger vertical blocks of color stood out better when viewed from a distance, compared to the early-era unit flags with colored corners (I tried the latter and then removed them, replacing them with the later flags). The flags came from www.warflag.com.   
• I haven't flocked these yet; I'm not 100% sure this is how I want them based, and it'll be easier to change my mind and re-base if they're not flocked; so just for now I'll keep the bases plain.
• I'm going to do two units more French units (enough to make one One-Hour Wargames army), then I'll move on to the Austrians and finish enough for an opposing army so I can play while completing the remaining 4 units for each army's full set.

Progress on the One-Hour Wargames project: three 6mm French infantry battalions done.

Normal view from about 18 inches away:


Zoomed view:


Still need to properly base and flock them, and add flags.

One of the reasons I want to start painting 6mm is that I just don't have the time for larger figures and everyone who has tried 6mm seems to assert they are much faster than larger scales.

Some years ago, I decided I wanted to try a Napoleonic skirmish game in 54mm. I painted this fellow, the first of what was supposed to be a "squad" of French light infantry:


This mini took me about four hours to paint – not including priming, overcoating, basing and flocking – and he ended up being the only 54mm Napoleonic model I ever completed.

Smaller size minis – for example, my 28mm fantasy figures – take me about two hours each to paint.

In starting my 6mm Napoleonic project, I chose to time how long it took to paint my first unit of 32 French line infantry, for comparison. I used a very basic paint job, since at a normal viewing distance of one to two feet or so, it is impossible to see much, if any, detail (though more on this below).


I adopted the painting process from Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames which seems ideal for such small minis:

"When painting begins, an assembly line process can be adopted. Let us assume that the budding wargamer has acquired some British Napoleonic infantry of the Waterloo campaign, and has prepared 12 figures ready for painting by giving them a black undercoat. The next step is to paint all the jackets in red. Once the last figure has had its jacket painted, the first miniature should be dry enough to paint the trousers in grey. This is followed by the hands and face (flesh or pink paint), and finally the base (green). The black undercoat can legitimately suffice for the other parts of the figure, covering muskets, shoes, backpack and headwear."

I added a tiny bit more detail, but otherwise followed this approach. After mounting with blu-tack and priming black, I painted the following: green bases (15 minutes), white trousers (15 minutes), blue tunics first coat (15 minutes), blue tunics second coat (7 minutes), brown muskets (7 minutes), brown backpacks (9 minutes), flesh (9 minutes), all metal items (6 minutes), general touch-up (5 minutes).

The total time for post-priming application of color was 88 minutes. One-and-a-half hours to paint 32 men, as opposed to two hours for a single 28mm mini, or four hours for a single 54mm figure.  This is a huge change.

With such a basic paint scheme, these models don't look like much close up:


But from just one or two feet away, they look very much the part, I think:


You may be wondering why I didn't paint the lapels and crossbelts white. Well, I did. Then I undid that (which added another 15 minutes to the painting time, but that won't happen again, so it doesn't count). Painting the lapels and crossbelts created a very bizarre effect. The crossbelts and lapels looked right close up on each individual man, but from a distance they looked completely wrong. The whole mass just looked like a white blob, with the white thoroughly dominating and washing out the blue of the tunics such that there was no blue visible at all from a distance. So I went back over the crossbelts and lapels with blue and decided to leave them that way. Now they don't look quite right as individual men, but the mass as a whole looks better to me, and that's the effect I want.

After a two-year hiatus from painting (for which I mostly blame professional issues) I ordered two army sets of Baccus 6mm Napoleonics – one French, one Austrian – which arrived in the mail yesterday. I plan to use these with Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames Rules (1HW).


Armies in 1HW consist of 6 units, though with variable composition a complete "army set" for any given nationality requires 10 units. For the horse and musket era, this comes out to:

4 x line infantry
2 x light infantry
2 x artillery
2 x cavalry

In practice an army will have on the table 3-4 units of line infantry plus 2-3 units of other types for a total of 6 units in a game.


Normally played with 15-25mm models in units with a frontage of 4-6 inches each on a 3' x 3' battlefield, I'm going a bit smaller, using 6mm models on a 2' x 2' battlefield (and of course all movement rates and weapon ranges cut to 2/3).


I have a ton of bases on hand and I worked out my basing last night by experimenting with different configurations. What I liked best were 2" square bases (i.e. a 2" frontage) with the following numbers of models in each one-base unit.

32 foot figures for line infantry
16 foot figures for light infantry
12 mounted figures for cavalry
2 guns + 8 crew for artillery


Today I hope to get all the models stuck on to tongue depressors with blu-tack and primed in black. Painting "the unit not the man" will be a new experience for me. Everyone seems to assert that painting 6mm models is faster and easier than painting larger minis. I'll find out for myself in the next couple weeks.